Five-Dog Epiphany
How a Quintet of Badass Bichons Retrieved Our Joy
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A new installment in best-selling author Ann Hood’s Gracie Belle imprint, actress Marianne Leone’s (The Sopranos, etc.) memoir explores how a bereaved couple and a pack of rescue dogs rediscovered joy
IN FIVE-DOG EPIPHANY, MARIANNE LEONE writes about the joy that can be summoned after a great loss, "when you look into the eyes of another damaged creature and know that your happiness is a mirror and an echo and a prayer, and that the little soul reflecting all that energy is happy too, at last." This memoir is a moving and sometimes surprisingly funny exploration of grief and the mutual healing that can occur between rescue dogs and people who have experienced a soul-crushing loss. Leone and her husband, actor Chris Cooper, lost their only child suddenly in 2005. Jesse was seventeen, a straight-A student, and a brilliant poet, who was also quadriplegic and nonverbal except with the assistance of a computer.
When six-year-old Jesse miraculously blurted "dog" to Santa, Goody appeared on his bed on Christmas morning. Goody was followed by Lucky, Frenchy, Titi, and Sugar, all rescues adopted after Jesse’s passing. After Jesse’s death, Leone grew a tumor the size of her premature son at birth, her husband disappeared into dark acting roles (Breach, Married Life), and Leone fainted during the filming of a scene in The Sopranos where she is standing in front of her television son’s coffin.
This is the story of a bereaved couple and a pack of rescue dogs finding their way to a new life, everyone licking their wounds, both corporal and spiritual, and the rediscovery of joy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sopranos actor Leone (Knowing Jesse) shares in this moving memoir how she and her husband, actor Chris Cooper, began recovering from the death of their teenage son. In 2005, Leone and Cooper's 17-year-old son, Jesse—who suffered a cerebral hemorrhage after his birth that left him permanently disabled—died in his sleep. Devastated, the couple found solace in caring for Jesse's pet bichon frise, Goody, until Goody died of heart failure a few months later, on the eve of an operation to remove a cancerous tumor from Leone's abdomen. To celebrate Leone's clean bill of health following that procedure, she and Cooper adopted two bichons from a shelter. The dogs had been so badly abused that they hardly allowed the couple to touch them. Gradually, however, Leone and Cooper broke through the canines' defenses, finding that the process helped repair their spirits after Jesse's death. Eventually, they adopted two more bichons. In lyrical prose, Leone captures "the feeling that comes when you look into the eyes of another damaged creature and know that your happiness is a mirror and an echo and a prayer." Readers mourning their own losses will find comfort in these pages. Photos. Correction: A previous version of this review misdescribed the cause of Goody's death and the nature of Leone's operation.
